Entertainment

Weekend Gaming: "Medal of Honor," "Enslaved" and the Return of a Legend [OPEN THREAD]

The latest installment of Medal of Honor hit shelves this week. The game is a reboot of the long running series of shooters, and feels as though it was designed in an attempt to take on the Modern Warfare juggernaut.

In an attempt to modernize the series, the new Medal of Honor follows a team of elite Tier 1 soldiers in the events after September 11. The game takes part in military operations in Afghanistan and is, to put it lightly, pretty violent.

Medal of Honor doesn't necessarily rival the ultra-cinematic singleplayer of Modern Warfare, but it isn't a dud. From my experience, it was mostly well-done, with solid pacing and engaging gameplay.

Its multiplayer, on the other hand, doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the Modern Warfare experience. This leaves some serious doubts regarding its ability to perform longterm

Some Other Games

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is the sort of action-adventure game that consoles were built on. There's more here than the button mashing that you'd find in an old Castlevania, but it manages to harness that old school platformer feel to some new effects.

Granted the main characters, Monkey and Trip, are so ridiculously named, that at times I wanted to let them get eaten by robots, but upon further thought, I decided that it was their parents who deserved to be eaten. Enslaved redeems its poor choice of names with some particularly dynamic gameplay. Sure it's kind of messed up that Monkey has been enslaved by Trip, but he has a sort of preternatural knack for crushing robots, which makes him a solid vehicle for some Enslaved carnage.

Trip, for her part, is pretty useless. We're not talking Ico useless, but let's just say that the game would be really short if Monkey weren't around, because she'd be immediately eaten by the robots. Still, we get the impression that even if Trip set him free, Monkey would come back to help — he's just that kind of guy

Speaking of Castlevania, it's back and it's awesome. Castlevania: Lords of Shadows finds Gabriel Belmont whipping his way through hordes of vampires, werewolves and other monsters on his way to save the world, or the soul of his dead wife or something.

But this isn't just a rehash of your mom's old Castlevania platformer. Gabriel doesn't just hop from platform to platform throwing wooden stakes and holy water at Frankenstein. He lashes out with a fiery whip (remarkably accurately, I might add) and enemies that dwarf him by daunting magnitudes. He then levels up about 40 times, becoming absurdly powerful and reiterating the old adage that "size isn't everything."

In the end, Castlevania: Lords of Shadows has such expansive settings and enormous bosses that the game has the feel of something epic enough to be the latest installment in one of the longest running franchises in gaming history. Oh, and it's narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart, so there's that.

Weekend Gaming

We've looked at "Medal of Honor," "Enslaved" and "Castlevania," but we know that's not all that you're playing. So the question remains: What are you playing this weekend?

The weekend gaming open thread is intended to bring Mashable gamers together through conversation about games. This thread is for those of us who had the first NES and for those whose first gaming experience happened on an Xbox 360, so let’s try to keep it fun for everyone.

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